From: Andreas Stemmer <Andreas.Stemmer_at_web.de>
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 23:00:55 +0200

> In fact, EAC has an option to detect and leave out the gaps when
> ripping/encoding. This is what I've done in the past, in the hope I
> would get continous playback. Apparently, I was wrong :)

But there are no gaps on the cd if it is a live cd (some cd drives add
some digital silence at the beginning and the ending of tracks, because
the can't seek to the exact position). The gaps come from the mp3
encoding process, because mp3 data is frame based. As far as I know, a
few milliseconds of the audio data is taken and processed to one frame.
Therefore at the end of the wav-file, you normally get a frame which
isn't filled completely, digital silence is added to get a full frame.
If you encode the whole cd as one mp3 you don't have this problem, but
you have to cut the file at frame boundaries afterwards which are a few
milliseconds away from the original boundaries. You normally won't
notice this small shift of track start.
I think (actually I don't know) this is what the -nogap option of LAME
does, too. If you give LAME the whole row of audio files, it can shift
some audio data from one track to the next to get full frames, but it
won't have any effect if you process each file seperately.
Received on 2003-05-29